Konrad Schwarz (no.spam.delete@this.no.spam) on February 28, 2013 1:49 am wrote:
> rwessel (robertwessel.delete@this.yahoo.com) on February 28, 2013 12:29 am wrote:
> > *S/360 tradition is to number bits from left to right, so the
> > mask/value scheme makes perfect sense from that perspective.
>
> Labeling the most significant bit "0" is entirely consistent with having the most
> significant byte of an integer at offset 0 from the start of the number. In both
> cases, a place's value corresponds to base ^ (length_of_object - place).


It's been done both ways on big-endian machines. IBM's preference is to number from the left. Others, like 68K, AVR32 and SPARC* numbered from the right, which seems to be slightly more common, although there are others that do left-to-right (TI 990 and its single chip version the TMS9900 and PA-RISC come to mind as a random examples).


*Which, admittedly, is only mildly big-endian.